Debitoor Dictionary

Accounting terms explained in a simple way

Related words

Period End - What is the Period End?

Definition: The period end dates the end of your financial year. The period (or month) end date is used to report your business activity.

Time for reporting

The period end date is used to report your business activity at the end of a financial period. If you base your financial periods on calendar months, then at the end of each month (the period end) you would run your Profit and Loss account along with your balance sheet, in order to see how your business is doing.

Of course, these reports can be run any time during the period but at the end - once you have entered all your information, sales and supplier invoices, customer receipts, supplier payments, salary details etc. - it is useful to run off your reports in order to establish your companies position at the “period end”.

Closing the period

Once this has been completed and you have run off your reports (these are sometimes called “Management Reports”) you can close down the period so that no more information can be entered in that period to distort your already reported on figures.

Some companies base their periods on weeks and choose to end on the same day of the week, for example the Friday closest to the 31st. When this system has been adopted, some fiscal years will have 52 weeks and others 53 weeks.